Batch 14

Not only is this the first time I do a saison, but also the first time adding berries!

I think saisons are interesting but I’ve never tasted one with raspberry, only sour beers so I still had a picture of how it would taste. Saisons should be dry and that’s what I like, together of course with the funkiness some of them have. So, what could go wrong by adding raspberries? Not much, and others confirmed it being a great combo so lets give it a go.

First thing that I was surprised about was that saisons are supposed to ferment very warm compared to regular ale styles. As high as 30 to 32 degress Celsius is recommended, and how do someone go about achieving this when you want to be precise and live in Sweden? There are multiple ways, but after a lot of reading and sharing the experience of others, I decided for a heating cable commonly used in aquariums for reptiles. This cable was very easy to work with and could be taped inside the fridge, the cable only uses 50w so you could say I took the safe and secure bet instead of using a bigger “frost guard” which usually starts at 200w. On the other hand I was skeptical that it wouldn’t be able to heat the whole fridge to the desired temperature but this was in fact not a problem at all. So instead of risking burning everything up I decided for the smaller heating cable and it worked perfectly. No problem what so ever to to reach the target temperature of 30C before fermentation had started, and it could keep this temperature just fine.

I don’t know if it’s because of the higher fermentation temperature but it fermented really quickly. After just two days the activity in the airlock was gone so I waited a bit before adding the raspberries but I figured there wasn’t any reason to wait too much so I let the raspberries in and let it sit and extract all the goodness for two weeks. After the two weeks I took the first SG sample and it was measured at 0.999! That’s really low and dry, perfect! The beer turned out great as well, maybe a bit too high on alcohol but nothing that took over, just being there in the background.